Before Covid, we used to have projects with Huawei that needed visits to China, specifically to their HQ in Shenzhen. The calibre of their R&D is nothing short

Before Covid, we used to have projects with Huawei that needed visits to China, specifically to their HQ in Shenzhen. The calibre of their R&D is nothing short of world class. I've had the pleasure of deep-dive analysis and problem solving with some extremely talented and intelligent minds there. Though we had a language barrier, it became irrelevant after a few discussions. What also amazed me about a company of that size was their decision making process and ability to commit resources and money to actions at very short notice. Their divisions and teams operate in a very autonomous style, and the teams I interacted with were definitely empowered to make strategic calls and commit to them. This may not be true across the whole organisation, but it does broadly appear to be an indicator of their culture. Back then, they were already doing a fair amount of work on upstream cellular networking and related tech around 5G, SOC design, manufacturing processes and improvements, and a whole lot more. They were not shy about discussing sanctions and were (still are) hard at work towards self-sufficiency, sanctions or not. What's happening now was not only expected, it could not have turned out otherwise. Also note, we're hearing about Huawei because they are one of the biggest. There are several other smaller and niche players who are part of the game.